Question I have been a bit scared to ask because people here jump down your throat if you dare be different.

If lightening introduces cheaper/free-like transactions? wont that diminish the value/volume of expensive(price driving) bitcoin transactions on the main chain?

I have thought enough about this to have some things to say. I'll add more later if I can think of more.

The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable eternal database. You can store something in there and be confident that that information will be stored forever. That is crazy useful. Property titles, ownership tokens, other blockchains will offer this of course, but bitcoin will always be the most ideal place.

Also we can always just not increase the block size, ever, until we feel like miners are more than fairly compensated through transaction fees and all models predict that a modest increase in block size will still reatain adequate network security. In fact we can base our decisions about when to increase the block size on no consideration other than security. I personally feel that everything else is secondary.

Also I don't think there is a world where lightning gets to the point where it isn't unjustifiably cumbersome for large transactions. Nation states that want to use bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT will probably find the blockchain it's self to be the place to do something like that. So there will still always be a marginal demand for on chain transactions.

Question I have been a bit scared to ask because people here jump down your throat if you dare be different.

If lightening introduces cheaper/free-like transactions? wont that diminish the value/volume of expensive(price driving) bitcoin transactions on the main chain?

I have thought enough about this to have some things to say. I'll add more later if I can think of more.

The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable eternal database. You can store something in there and be confident that that information will be stored forever. That is crazy useful. Property titles, ownership tokens, other blockchains will offer this of course, but bitcoin will always be the most ideal place.

Also we can always just not increase the block size, ever, until we feel like miners are more than fairly compensated through transaction fees and all models predict that a modest increase in block size will still reatain adequate network security. In fact we can base our decisions about when to increase the block size on no consideration other than security. I personally feel that everything else is secondary.

Also I don't think there is a world where lightning gets to the point where it isn't unjustifiably cumbersome for large transactions. Nation states that want to use bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT will probably find the blockchain it's self to be the place to do something like that. So there will still always be a marginal demand for on chain transactions.

Question I have been a bit scared to ask because people here jump down your throat if you dare be different.

If lightening introduces cheaper/free-like transactions? wont that diminish the value/volume of expensive(price driving) bitcoin transactions on the main chain?

I have thought enough about this to have some things to say. I'll add more later if I can think of more.

The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable eternal database. You can store something in there and be confident that that information will be stored forever. That is crazy useful. Property titles, ownership tokens, other blockchains will offer this of course, but bitcoin will always be the most ideal place.

Also we can always just not increase the block size, ever, until we feel like miners are more than fairly compensated through transaction fees and all models predict that a modest increase in block size will still reatain adequate network security. In fact we can base our decisions about when to increase the block size on no consideration other than security. I personally feel that everything else is secondary.

Also I don't think there is a world where lightning gets to the point where it isn't unjustifiably cumbersome for large transactions. Nation states that want to use bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT will probably find the blockchain it's self to be the place to do something like that. So there will still always be a marginal demand for on chain transactions.

It's about choices, IMO.

Much of the ideals we early bitcoiners have lauded are not something that all of humanity can share without there being a tremendous amount of personal responsibility. Probably an unreasonable amount.

For example: Banks.

Hang around here and you will read many saying GET RID OF 'EM. But the fact is we will always need them. At least some people will. And layer 2 lets us build the services that the new "banks" will use to offer us value for letting them put their paws on our money. Here is something we are hearing said a lot recently: "Custodial services". Not everyone has the ability or desire to do the sort of opsec to safeguard deep amounts of value in crypto. And even the more savvy like (dare i say) many of us would benefit from a nice liquid place to lock up some liquid money for spending and moving around.

Layer 1 plus layer 2 gives me the option to be responsible for the mass of my wealth privately, while directing some of it into channels that may look a little like banks... or perhaps less distributed.

I'm so tired of all of this ignorant anti lighting network rhetoric that I keep hearing and seeing constantly. Do you guys think Ver is funding this BS. It feels like there is just too much of it for it to be organic.

P.S. Do you guys feel this is on topic enough for the wall observer thread. It's not about jews at least... but it's exactly about the price either... I just wanted a place to rant where it would actually be read and it is about bitcoin atleast...

Not enough talk of jello wrestling and asses, I say delete it.

Distributed is the new centralization

A lot of think tanks have worked out they can still manipulate if they run a distributed program and know we now hate centralization (anything centralized)

So now the fear starts as to why distributed programs are "SAFE" and "SECURE" for you

Miners won't let the price fall to 5000. This is only one aspect to the manipulation that’s been going on since September. However if you look at the hash rate, it’s trending upwards, almost parabolically. This is because asic miners are in excess and they can ship them out much faster than last year, when demand was at ATH. Coupled with strange miner confidence in bitcoin which I cannot explain. Even if you ignore hashrate increase, assume miners do not leave bitcoin, and look at the price vs. block difficulty by the end of the year, profitability approaches 0 in all cases from 7500-10000. If miners switch, it can alleviate this pressure, but who will be leaving and who can afford to weather this storm currently? Big farms are more economical than small miners. It seems like an effort to weed out small miners and their coins, while centralizing mining, all while they can make money by liquidating people on longs/shorts. If it wasn’t a manipulated market I wouldn’t believe this, but it seems likely. I welcome regulations and investigations into market manipulation. After all, exchanges are the only ones who can see real volume.

People don't seem to understand that miners can and will mine at a loss. The only real limit is that it be cheaper than other forms of money laundering.

Miners won't let the price fall to 5000. This is only one aspect to the manipulation that’s been going on since September. However if you look at the hash rate, it’s trending upwards, almost parabolically. This is because asic miners are in excess and they can ship them out much faster than last year, when demand was at ATH. Coupled with strange miner confidence in bitcoin which I cannot explain. Even if you ignore hashrate increase, assume miners do not leave bitcoin, and look at the price vs. block difficulty by the end of the year, profitability approaches 0 in all cases from 7500-10000. If miners switch, it can alleviate this pressure, but who will be leaving and who can afford to weather this storm currently? Big farms are more economical than small miners. It seems like an effort to weed out small miners and their coins, while centralizing mining, all while they can make money by liquidating people on longs/shorts. If it wasn’t a manipulated market I wouldn’t believe this, but it seems likely. I welcome regulations and investigations into market manipulation. After all, exchanges are the only ones who can see real volume.

People don't seem to understand that miners can and will mine at a loss. The only real limit is that it be cheaper than other forms of money laundering.

Yeah Bitmain is about to go public, it helps a lot to go public as a profitable company with high demand for it's products, a fall below mining cost kills buying and their revenue. They won't let that happen right now.

I just ran into this. This is so stupid.No shit it can't look like the one on the right. The one on the right is the problem. That's what bitcoin looks like right now and it's the reason why it doesn't scale.

I'm very disheartened today. Lost a major chunk of my bitcoin holdings (almost 0.38 BTC) on Bitmex even though I've been longing since $8000 with just 4x leverage (adding more & more after every dump to average it further down), but still at $6140, I got liquidated. With this, I can pretty much assure that $6140 was actually the bottom. It was only to liquidate me, hard luck. Don't comment that I need to risk only what I can afford to lose, I know that very well, just had some real bad luck (as well as confusion) this time.

Miners won't let the price fall to 5000. This is only one aspect to the manipulation that’s been going on since September. However if you look at the hash rate, it’s trending upwards, almost parabolically. This is because asic miners are in excess and they can ship them out much faster than last year, when demand was at ATH. Coupled with strange miner confidence in bitcoin which I cannot explain. Even if you ignore hashrate increase, assume miners do not leave bitcoin, and look at the price vs. block difficulty by the end of the year, profitability approaches 0 in all cases from 7500-10000. If miners switch, it can alleviate this pressure, but who will be leaving and who can afford to weather this storm currently? Big farms are more economical than small miners. It seems like an effort to weed out small miners and their coins, while centralizing mining, all while they can make money by liquidating people on longs/shorts. If it wasn’t a manipulated market I wouldn’t believe this, but it seems likely. I welcome regulations and investigations into market manipulation. After all, exchanges are the only ones who can see real volume.

People don't seem to understand that miners can and will mine at a loss. The only real limit is that it be cheaper than other forms of money laundering.

True. Moreover, increasing hash-rate doesn't necessarily mean that the number of miners is increasing, it might also be due to the newer versions of Bitmain now available in the market with greatly improved efficiency.